HP has once again reached outside the company to find some leadership. This time it snagged a well-known software guy, George Kadifa, and handed him the ailing software business.

Kadifa is an interesting choice for HP's software because for the past couple of years he's been working as a software company turnaround specialist for private equity firm Silver Lake Partners. In Silver-Lake-speak, Kadifa was a member of the "Value Creation Team" which was lead by former Cisco star Charles Giancarlo.

As a private equity firm, Silver Lake buys stakes in later stage companies. Kadifa's company's include Serena Software and Vantage Data Centers, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Kadifa's will now become HP's executive vice president of software. Even though the guy that held the role before him, Bill Veghte, was just made COO, Kadifa will report directly to Meg Whitman and not Veghte, HP says.

Kadifa gained his street cred in the Valley as a senior VP at Oracle in the late 1990's. He then became CEO of Corio, an early software-as-a-service company, until IBM bought it for $182 million in 2005. He hung out at IBM for a couple of years, before heading to Silver Lake.

We originally thought that Kadifa would be given the hard but extremely important task of making something great out of Autonomy, the enterprise search software tech that HP bought last year for more than $10 billion. Autonomy's financials are reported as part of the company's Software group. But that's not the case. Here's the list of software products that will fall under Kadifa's care, PR says.

Can yet another outsider to HP, Kadifa, figure it all out? We'll see.

UPDATED: HP PR contacted us and said that job of managing HP's Autonomy software unit is NOT part of Kadifa job, but will remain with Bill Veghte. We apologize for the error and have updated this story accordingly.